ediate Age.#--There is a significant
difference in the purpose of the opportunities presented during
childhood and during adolescence. If they were to be summed up in
key-words, that for childhood would be absorption; for adolescence,
adjustment.

The opportunities of childhood converge toward supplying the soul with
material needful for growth--influences, impressions, and a mass of
facts more or less unconnected in the beginning. But this is only the
first step in character building. These materials must be arranged,
facts must be related to one another, and the life must be related to
other lives in real interest, sympathy, and service. This process of
relating fact to fact, life to life, and each soul anew to God is the
paramount task of adolescence, even though absorption continues with
almost unabated strength.

Analyzing the opportunities which are presented to the Intermediate
teacher in this new adjustment of life, three stand out prominently:

(1) _The opportunity to foster high ideals._ Whether it be consciously
defined or not, every one has that toward which ambitions and effort
go forth, and this ideal determines what character shall be. No one
can give an ideal to another, as a book is handed over, for it is a
personal thing, to be fashioned by each soul for itself out of that
which it has absorbed through the years.

It is in the transition from childhood to maturity that every life
decides what (for it) seems most worth while, and to this ideal makes
surrender of thought, desire, and effort. Is not God's gracious
purpose evident, in that this is the time when life is most easily
influenced?

(2) _Opportunity to develop self-reliance._ A life cannot count for
God and for others unless it can make decisions and meet tests by
itself. The power to do this comes only through effort to do it.
During the Intermediate age, the young people may be more and more
thrown upon their own resources, permitted to decide matters for
themselves, learning wiser judgment through mistakes as well as
successes. One of the most serious errors on the part of the teacher
lies at this very point, dictating instead of suggesting, choosing for
the pupil instead of allowing him to choose, thinking for him instead
of stimulating every power of his soul to rise to a personal solution
of the problem in hand. If strength and independence of character do
not come in these years of adjustment, the probabilities are that life
will a